Abstract
Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Emerging Sexual and Reproductive Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa is a collection of original ethnographic research that covers an array of topics, ranging from emergency contraception, medicalized abortion, surrogacy, Viagra, and sex toys. An effort to understand the interplay of the global flow of sexual and reproductive technologies with local cultures in the Middle East and North Africa, the essays in this volume explore how different societies, each with diverse conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, appropriate, react, and contest new technologies. The captivating ethnographies in this volume turn a much-needed spotlight on the ways that the global landscape of sexual and reproductive technologies shapes the individual lives of those who live in a region, that despite Western impressions, is anything but monolithic.
The book’s main argument is that sexual and reproductive technologies provide a unique vantage point for studying the interplay of medicine, science, religion, politics, and culture on gendered bodies, selves, and relationships. The editors have successfully brought together a range of essays that reveal the relationships between the body politic and state and religious power. Each of the contributions in this volume exposes how power dynamics of different regions are made visible with the introduction and maintenance of new technologies. The book is organized in three sections: Preventing and Terminating Pregnancy, Achieving Pregnancy and Parenthood, and Engaging Sex and Sexuality. Throughout each of these sections, readers learn more about which individuals and groups serve as moral gatekeepers, who has the power to shape and control gender and sexual norms, and which groups can successfully challenge and subvert dominant ideologies.
A major strength of this volume is that it shows how this region of the globe is neither uniform nor monolithic in terms of the way they react to sexual and reproductive technologies. As each essay demonstrates, the ways that each nation moralizes such technologies occurs at the nexus of religious institutions, commercial enterprises, the regulatory power of the state, and local and transnational social movements. Most fascinating for me was learning about the striking differences in the way each nation regulates sexual and reproductive health technologies. In fact, the region was accepting of reproductive technologies in ways that were quite surprising to me. The widespread agreement among Islamic theologians about the permissibility of using contraception and the acceptance of abortion in cases where the pregnancy threatens a woman’s physical health stands in sharp contrast to America’s evangelical stance—an irony that was not lost on me as our national rhetoric routinely casts the Islamic region as having more oppressive policies and attitudes against women. Furthermore, some of the most compelling essays in this volume explore how even among this general acceptance of abortion (in those cases where a woman’s life is in danger) and contraception, the emerging technologies of mifepristone and misoprostol, which afford women safe options for terminating pregnancy, occupy a liminal status, and are thus unique vantage points through which to study power relations, cultural framing, and gender norms in the region.
Another fundamental strength of this volume is how each essay unveils the often unexpected ways that emerging technologies can advance both normative and nonnormative gender roles. Many of the contributions reveal the extent to which technologies offer new ways of imagining masculinities, femininities, and those bodies and selves who reject binary sex/gender categories. For example, various essays present a nuanced portrait of Muslim men and masculinity; we are drawn in to situations where men support their wives through challenging decisions about fetal reduction, emotionally taxing IVF procedures, and egg preservation before chemotherapy—again offering a healthy departure from Western stereotypes of Muslim men as distant and controlling. Likewise, in many of these essays, we learn about how new feminine selves and subjectivities are forged with emerging technologies. For example, new technologies such as the introduction of mifepristone in Tunisia and emergency contraception in Morocco, now allow women to disconnect sexuality from reproduction. Likewise, a fascinating essay on hymenoplasty in contemporary Iran reveals how surgical interventions can permit women to conceal their previous sexual experiences, even as they publicly conform to cultural and religious mores.
This volume is not without its limitations. As with any edited volume, some of these essays are more compelling than others. Also, despite the editors’ claim that this text offers new imaginations for sexualities, the overwhelming majority of these essays are forged within a heteronormative framework. These limitations notwithstanding, this is a book that would appeal to all those interested in transnational and global feminisms, global reproductive and sexual health, medical sociology, science and technology, and gender studies. It would be a useful text for graduate seminars in Transnational Feminist Theory, Gender and Technology, and Gender, Sexuality, and Health. I could even imagine adopting specific chapters into undergraduate courses in Sociology of Gender, Gender and Health, and Introduction to Gender Studies.